welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Sweeny Toddler the infamous demonic baby first
appeared in the first issue of SHIVER AND SHAKE in March 1973. The paper lasted
for less than two years, so there was only enough time for one X-mas episode of
Sweeny
Toddler. Script and artwork by Leo Baxendale:

SHIVER AND SHAKE was merged into
WHOOPEE! in October 1974. It sounds quite surprising, but Sweeny didn’t make a straightforward
leap to the new combined comic. It had to prove its strength by participating
in a poll: WHOOPEE! editor selected 8 strips and invited readers to vote in a Pick-A-Strip competition that ran in the Autumn of 1974. Sweeny was declared
victor in WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE cover-dated 22nd March, 1975, and his
regular appearances recommenced a week later. This means that Sweeny
Toddler would have missed the X-mas of 1974 even if WHOOPEE! hadn’t
been affected by industrial action in the end of that year and the X-mas issue
of the paper had been published (WHOOPEE! missed the last week of 1974
and the first two weeks of 1975).

Leo Baxendale stopped drawing Sweeny
Toddler in June 1975, and was succeeded by the excellent Tom Paterson who
imitated Mr. Baxendale’s style very well indeed. Here are the next three festive
episodes from the 1975, 1976 and 1977 X-mas issues of WHOOPEE! :

Friday, April 15, 2016

The very early installments of The Banana Bunch in The Beezer were full-pagers with a single
picture. Drawn by the young Leo Baxendale, they were printed in colour on the
back page of the comic for thirteen weeks starting from the very first issue
(January 21, 1956). Starting from issue 14 (April 21, 1956) the feature was
moved to the inside of the paper and appeared in black and red.

The reason I am writing this post is because some time
ago I saw a copy of The Beezer
from 1961 on eBay. One of the photos uploaded by the seller showed a reprint on
one of those early full-page sets, rendered in back and red. I though my
readers might be interested to see the two versions side by side. Here’s the
original in full-colour from The Beezer
No. 10 (March 24, 1956):

… and here’s its twin from the issue cover-dated June
24, 1961:

The colour version looks OK, but I have to say that in
this particular case I prefer the reprint. What do you think? I wonder if DC
Thomson reprinted other early installments of The Banana Bunch in the
same way?

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Sweeny Toddler, the demonic baby who brought lots of fun to generations of children in
the UK over a number of decades, first appeared in SHIVER AND SHAKE in 1973. I
covered the SHIVER AND SHAKE period of the strip in an old post HERE.

This time let’s retrace Sweeny’s path from SHIVER AND SHAKE to the new comic
with the clumsy title of WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE.

WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE was 32 pages thick at
the time. It seems like a lot of space to fill, but Whoopee! had a strong lineup of characters as it were, and it
had to accommodate quite a few refugees from SHIVER AND SHAKE who were too
popular to be discontinued with the demise of their home comic (Frankie
Stein, Scream Inn and a few others), so re-arrangements were
inevitable and competition was tough.

Sweeny Toddler didn’t make a straightforward leap to the new comic – it had to prove
its strength by participating in a poll. The Editor selected 8 strips and invited
readers to vote in a Pick-A-Strip competition.
Most of the entrants were either WHOOPEE!’s own (presumably less successful) features
– Pop
Snorer, Little Miss Muffit, Snap Happy and The Upper Crusts and the Lazy Loafers,
or those from SHIVER AND SHAKE - The Desert Fox, Grimly Feendish and Sweeny
Toddler. This is what Sweeny’s entry looked like in WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE cover-dated 23rd November, 1974:

Results were announced in the issue cover-dated 22nd
March, 1975:

… and Sweeny Toddler proudly returned to
the spotlight a week later in the Easter issue of WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER AND SHAKE
cover-dated 29th March, 1975:

It would have been interesting to see the vote count.
Perhaps it was a close call for Sweeny? Was there a chance that he would have faded
into oblivion, had the runner-up received a few more votes in its favour?..

Friday, September 25, 2015

Below
are the remaining two Buster covers by Leo Baxendale from 1967, followed by
examples of The Cave Kids and The Pirates by Bax from the same period. It
appears that the artist also did the lettering throughout the runs of both
strips.

By
way of a teaser for the next post, I can say that I decided to check if I can find
more examples of cap-less Buster. Come back soon to see some results of my quest.
In the meantime, here’s an image of Buster-less cap from 1985: